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Kate Chopin was not a conventional woman.  She was a professional writer at a time when it was unusual and somewhat irregular for a woman to have such an occupation.  She was unconventional though, before she became a writer and shocked her in-laws with her behaviour which would have seemed most unladylike in New Orleans… Read More

Sherlock Holmes fiction probably conjures up images of fog bound London streets, hansom cabs and cosy scenes in 221b Baker Street with its Victorian décor.  However, this year marks the centenary of the publication of three particular Sherlock Holmes short stories and it may seem strange to think of Sherlock Holmes in the 1920s.  ‘The… Read More

‘The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations’ (Count Leo Tolstoy)  In this final blog on a trio of great Russian novels, Sally Minogue suggests reasons for thinking that Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is the greatest of the three. The… Read More

‘The idea is to depict an absolutely wonderful person.’ (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1867) Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ The Idiot is the novel in which Dostoevsky attempted the difficult experiment of creating a central character who embodied goodness. Sally Minogue looks at the resulting fiction.  The Idiot (1869) was the first of the big Russian novels that I… Read More

‘The great drama of his life was the struggle for a better state of things in Russia.’ (Henry James on Ivan Turgenev) The publication of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) caused an unprecedented sensation in Russia. Sally Minogue has a look at its contemporary context, and at the novel as we might read it today. … Read More

At the start of a short series of blogs on three nineteenth-century Russian novels, Sally Minogue considers their powerful ongoing appeal. The Golden Age of Russian Literature I have mentioned in an earlier blog on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov the fascination that the great Russian novels of the nineteenth-century exerted on me as a… Read More

Denise Hanrahan Wells looks at one of Henry James’ best-known works. What does a Henry James novella and Percy Bysshe Shelley have in common?  Well, an anecdote related to the latter inspired the former.  Whilst staying with friends in Florence during 1887, Henry James recorded in his Notebooks a story he had heard concerning Claire… Read More

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is the classic beauty and the beast tale written by Victor Hugo, the author of that other enduring tale of passion and tragedy, Les Miserables. Hugo, (1802 -1885) was a prolific novelist poet, playwright and politician. He became one of the masters of French romanticism, a literary movement that placed emphasis… Read More